TechFlow News, February 23: According to Cointelegraph, Greg Cipolaro, NYDIG’s Head of Research, released a research report last Friday stating that as the crypto industry matures, the number of applications capable of attracting investors is shrinking. The “investable universe” is gradually narrowing to niche areas that extend traditional financial products onto blockchain infrastructure—specifically Bitcoin, tokenized assets, stablecoins, select DeFi infrastructure, and a few general-purpose blockchains such as Ethereum.
Cipolaro noted that blockchain use cases once highly touted—such as gaming, social networks, and the metaverse—have cooled significantly. This is because centralized systems remain “inherently superior” for the vast majority of enterprise and consumer applications in terms of speed, cost, and operational efficiency. He argued that blockchain’s core attributes—trustlessness, permissionlessness, and censorship resistance—are fundamentally better suited to monetary and quasi-monetary financial applications, rather than broad real-world scenarios.
He added that current market dynamics already reflect this trend: Bitcoin’s market share continues to rise, while altcoins attract limited capital due to a “lack of enduring new narratives.” Although this narrowing of the investable universe may help clarify long-term winners, it could also constrain speculative capital flowing into alternative assets, potentially limiting the crypto market’s overall addressable size well below early expectations.
